Minecraft Name:
SonnyCPretzel
Suggestion:
We change the town portal room layout to a simpler, more player friendly layout that is easy to navigate and find active towns. In addition, to get rid of the old inactive towns that are just sitting around.
Reason:
The current spawn layout is very confusing, inconvenient, difficult to navigate, and really laggy. Its hard to find the active towns and sort them out from the inactive towns, along with actually finding the town you're looking for.
Other Information:
This would be done by having a total remake of the town portal rooms and taking out every portal. Every mayor/president + that wants their town to have a portal would basically apply to have it put back in by linking the town portal applications for the town that they own to sort out the active from inactive towns. This would make it so much easier to find active towns, AND cut down a lot of the lag in the portal rooms and startup lag caused by all the portals that are not being used/are inactive. Since they're not being used anyways, we have no need for them. They are just sitting around collecting dust and causing unnecessary lag.
I understand that this is a lot of work for the game admins. But I think the server has to be a more builder friendly. They hear that the server is about towns and money and stuff so they go into the portal room, can't find a town, get frustrated and quit.
The server has a 140 player peak. We haven't recovered that much. Why? I don't know. But we need people to stay. We need new players to stay. If that's not enough of a reason to not be lazy then feel free to become part of the problem that we have been facing that is making ECC a sinking ship. Work NEEDS to be done. We NEED to change something and we need to start now. The server is not very builder friendly. They aren't staying as much as we need them to. If you say we don't have a problem then I feel sorry for you because you are wrong. And everybody knows it. Everybody can see that. I know that this isn't the immediate solution but this is a problem that many players want to be changed and I see no reason other than the amount of work that would be needed as to why this would be a negative thing.
Going back to the original point, a remake of the town portal rooms would make it easier for all players to find towns that are active and accepting people They can take a look at which towns they liked or not, buy a plot and have a choice similar to how I did three years ago. Now, you don't really have a choice to look at cool towns and find the best one that is accepting people. You just ask for a plot in trade and hope for the best. The benefits of redesigning the portal room and taking out the old portals would cut lag, help increase the builder population, help revive the active towns, keep our town portal rooms up to date, and would may even be more of an incentive for players to buy town portals now since they have a chance of players finding their towns.

Option 2:
Since a fair number of people have suggested this within the suggestion, it seems like an idea that is better than not doing anything, and a simple bypass to the amount of work that would be needed.
We could have a premium portal room. As soon as you would go through the portal at spawn, you would enter a room/hallway with users who have their portals there. Again, it would be done by application, number the portals off (ex 1-20 or something) and they would choose which spot they would want. The increment of time that they would be allowed to stay there is measured weekly.
Some counter arguments that I could think of for this idea would be again, the work, but this is far less than the original idea, the fact that users would have to pay on top of their 75k or so they paid for the portal, and the fact that it would take attention away from the other portals back in the original portal rooms. Also, the cutting lag factor is practically nonexistent with this alternative. Now, I don't see these issues to be very prevalent because floors 1-3 is basically inactive and builders don't go past 1 anyways. So the portals that aren't being represented aren't really being seen anyways. The work, well sorry but something does need to be done. The startup time for the server is actually pretty fast, and if we have a completely different hallway or room or something for the premium portals then we wouldnt have to go through the slaughter of our fps in the main room. And also to cover the issue of users paying extra, I get it you don't want to pay, but the price should be fairly low honestly or run in the same fashion that spawn shops are run at. Just another thing about being on an economy server, you pay for everything.
This premium portal room would help sort out the chaos of what would be moving hundeds of portals. Also, it would first show the mayors+ that want their town seen. It would cut the amount of work needed, and along with with that would be really easy and simple to implement along with keeping all of the old portals they way they are so users who log on after a while don't lose their portal. I don't see a huge why not to this idea either.
I am not against this idea, not in the slightest. I saw that many people would like this as an alternative so I thought that I should list this. Thank you for the feedback so far. I am reading every comment made so feel free to write your ideas down.

 

I understand what you mean, and that is a very good argument. But all an owner coming back would do is fill out an application just to get their portal back. Now, another issue would be town members in the same situation. If the member really wants to get to their town after having their homes deleted, they could to find the town based on the coordinates listed on /rg i and they could pay a user to teleport to the co ords. They would find a way to get there.

 

This would get rid of something. Its not to get rid of the portals either. This is also to assist with the layout and the mixture of the active and inactive portals because the more active towns would apply first and the active towns would be presented more than the inactive ones. There is no possible way to stop town owners from quitting. It will happen, but the current way is that the first few floors are just flooded with inactive downs, but builders do not know that. They'll endlessly search for a town with an active owner until they give up. Most of them probably don't even go past the first floor. Also, I personally don't think that the hundreds of inactive mayors with portals are really going to apply again. It needs an update.